Poll: Should Drones And Robots Fight Our Wars?

That’s so last-century. Lasker&Parkes gave us WOPR in “War Games”, “The Twilight Zone” explored that idea in several episodes, and fiction writers have been addressing the question since before the turn of the previous century. It was Karel Čapek’s play “R.U.R” that gave us the word "robot’ over a hundred years ago. They all tend to share the ethnocentric idea that it’s better not to put our own people at risk while killing “other” people.

The best idea I ever ran across was from a low-budget hyper-creative BBC sci-fi-spoof series back in the late 1980’s-90’, “Red Dwarf”. In one episode (“Justice”, I think) the protagonists visit a prison world with no guards. They aren’t necessary because of a force field that reflects any violence inflicted by a prisoner back onto that person. That didn’t eliminate disagreements, of course, but it did curb the worst behavior.